


Gymnophoria and Apodyopis: A Duet in Sixteen Parts

by piggy09



Series: Obscure Word Fics [12]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Mentions of the Rachel/Paul scene if that's triggering to you, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-08 02:13:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1922862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about wolves, and girls, and the girls inside of wolves, and the wolves inside of girls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gymnophoria and Apodyopis: A Duet in Sixteen Parts

**Author's Note:**

> So, four or five people asked me on Tumblr for:
> 
> "Rachel/Sarah | Apodyopis: The act of mentally undressing someone."  
> "Rachel/Sarah | Gymnophoria: The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you."
> 
> "This sure looks like a blatant request for porn," I muttered to myself. "I'm sure they'd be equally happy if I interpreted 'undressing' as 'removing skins/artifice/etc' and wrote purple prose about it!"
> 
> Then I nodded decisively, and wrote this.
> 
> EDIT: The formatting is fixed! Huzzah! I've bumped this back up, since it should now be legible on _every_ computer and not just mine. And therefore: you should be leging it. ;)

i.

Rachel doesn’t go down to the labs, much. She tells herself that this is because she has very little to offer, that her time is better spent in her areas of expertise: making phone calls, moving pieces around the board. The world under a microscope is too small for her, too fragile. She prefers the vulnerability of human beings.

ii.

And that, at least, is true: she trims weakness from people like cutting limbs from branches, her eyes the neat _snick_ of shears. Later she will sit and graft these cuttings to her own skin, let her mouth droop open the same way in the mirror, pinch her wrist until she learns how to cry when necessary.

It’s curious. She loves it, inasmuch as she can love anything. As time goes on she learns more pressure points, more ways to strike, more ways to coax weakness out of people. Say _this_ , smile _thus_ , and layers strip from people until they are shaking, shivering, bare.

Infinitely more satisfying than the _science_ – and, though she never thinks it out loud, it makes far more sense.

This is only partially true. The other part of it is this: everyone there knows who she is. More importantly, they know _what_ she is. Entering the den of her creators is to feel the weight of their eyes on her, cataloguing all the tiny mechanical parts of her, all those gears and arteries. Lipstick is sliced from skin, skirt suits discarded – has it lost weight are its teeth satisfactory has it lost its mind, has it lost its mind, has it lost its mind.

Her smiles hold no weight. Her heels click loudly on the floor, but they may as well make no sound.

For Rachel, who seeks out vulnerability in others like a shark with blood in the water, the sensation is uncomfortably familiar. She remembers the shudder in the junior technician’s shoulders, when she’d fired him, and tenses her own shoulders overly tight.

She is not particularly fond of the turning of tables.

iii.

Rachel has met Sarah Manning precisely three times, outside of the grainy security tapes and confiscated photographs, the medical tests whose results she’d traced with the tip of her finger. Considered.

Three times. When she was very, _very_ young her father had read her fairy tales. The old ones, Aesop, Grimm. None of the modern, castrated classics, the villains who fall conveniently from cliffs, the thorns hastily swept aside. No, the Duncans understood that the point of fairy tales is _lessons_. Take away the metaphors, cut the wolf open with your axe and peel back the skin from its bones, and you will find warnings instead of marrow. Lessons.

One of these lessons is: three. There are three boxes, there are three faeries. The dead woman sings for three nights. Three is enough to build a story around, isn’t it?

It gives Rachel a twisted sort of pleasure to sit in a building whose scaffolding is data and whose brick-and-mortar bones are numbers, molecules, the twin pinnacles of Math and Science – to sit in that building, and contemplate fairy tales.

She doesn’t do it for long. Her father had switched to _The Island of Doctor Moreau_ , because the stories gave Rachel nightmares. She dreamed of peeling back the sheep’s clothing and finding herself a wolf; when she woke, she went to the mirror, opened her mouth, and prodded at her teeth.

iv.

Once upon a time, a little girl walked into a forest, and she looked at the wolf. Looked into the wolf’s red mouth. Looked at the wolf’s bright eyes.

The girl said: _What big eyes you have._

The wolf said: _Your eyes are the same._

The girl said: _What big teeth you have._

The wolf said: _Your teeth are the same._

The girl said: _You’re not an orphan anymore._

The wolf said: _The both of us are orphans._

v.

Twice upon a time, Rachel dons the sheep’s-clothing of Leekie’s office, turns her back on the door, leaves herself bare, turns her back on the door, leaves herself vulnerable.

vi.

She can feel her bones under her skin, shifting; what she feels is naked.

Sarah storms through the door in a way that is intensely predictable. Her boots _clomp_.

Rachel turns and delivers lessons, wrapped in wolf-skin threats. While she does this, she considers Sarah – pulls apart the pieces of her, peels the clothes from her skin and rubs the makeup from her eyes with the tips of her fingers. Considers.

She wonders if she could find _Rachel_ there, between the strands of Sarah’s hair, tucked away between the snarl of her fangs. Sarah spits threats at her like bits of broken tooth, neat bone-fragments, and Rachel wants to say _wait_ , wants to say _slow down_ , wants to say _take off your clothes, put these on instead, could you be me, could I ever be you_.

Instead she says, “you’re not going to shoot me, Sarah.” Because Rachel wouldn’t.

Sarah says the noise of a gun, firing. Sarah says the fast hot pressure of a gun across Rachel’s face.

Sarah _says_ the pressure of Sarah’s body against Rachel’s. What big teeth you have, oh. Rachel thinks about wedging her hand in Sarah’s mouth, peeling her lips back like skin, discarding them like clothes, tracing the canines (lupines) with the tip of her finger. Considering.

vii.

The girl said: _You don’t own us._

The wolf said: _I_ am _us, little girl. Stop running. Wolves are hunters, you know. You’re lucky I’m so patient._

The girl said: _What a big mouth you have._

The wolf said: _The better to eat you with. Come closer. I have guns for teeth; I will swallow you whole. You will be me. I will be you. Peel back your humanity and you are me, underneath. Right there beneath our skin._

The woodsman said: _Sarah, put it down._

Curiosity burns like a fire in her stomach. The heat of Sarah’s body is the same as Rachel’s. The anger in her is the same as Rachel’s, but she wears it like clothing, right there on her skin. None of the others have been this close. None of the others have _ever_ laid hands on her and now Rachel wants to do the same, stroke bruises from Sarah’s skin, see if they bloom the same color, bleed the same color.

Sarah is a gun against Rachel’s head and Rachel, well, Rachel _wants_.

viii.

Every morning the queen stood before the mirror and looked at herself, her red mouth, her bright eyes. Every morning she said, _Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who is the fairest one of all?_

And the mirror said, _you._

Until it didn’t.

ix.

“Daniel like that?”

“Did Sarah?”

Well, did she? Would she? Could she? Would she kiss the way Rachel would? Would she fuck the way Rachel would? Would she love the way Rachel would – which is to say, not at all?

No. No, Sarah loves – she loves Kira, presumably, along with the rest of her ragged family.

If you cut out Sarah’s heart from Sarah’s chest and put it in Rachel’s chest, would Rachel be able to love?

…

What an idiotic question. Hearts have nothing to do with emotion.

_Get that chair_ , she says, her voice shaking (did she) (would she) (could she) ( _you’re lying_ ) (and Rachel thinks) (about) (cutting open Sarah’s throat, placing the tips of her fingers against her vocal cords, putting the tips of her fingers against her own vocal cords, the two of them bleeding the same, speaking the same, did she would she could she), and watches the way Paul’s muscles ripple as he picks up the chair. Look at all of her lovely furniture. Her cunt throbs.

A question to consider: would Sarah’s?

She discards Paul like a shirt and thinks, briefly, of Sarah – only for a moment, only to imagine the way Rachel’s own muscles would bunch, expand, contract, as she picks up the chair. Rachel’s own face twisted into a scowl, all teeth. The way Sarah would snap her jaws, the way she’d cower in on herself as she took off her clothes – none of Paul’s obedience, bitter as it may be. The way she’d want to hide Rachel’s own skin from Rachel’s own eyes.

A long time ago wolves were made into dogs. Now dogs do everything they’re told, and they never bite the hands that feed them.

Paul’s saliva dries on Rachel’s fingers. She is still thinking about Sarah’s teeth.

x.

The queen said: _Mirror, mirror, on the wall/Who is the fairest one of all?_

The mirror said: _You, my queen, are fair; it is true/But the princess_

xi.

_Sarah:_ Hebrew, meaning: princess, lady.

_Rachel:_ Hebrew, meaning: ewe, sheep.

_is a thousand times fairer than you._

The queen shrieked, and punched the mirror. It shattered into a thousand glittering pieces, reflection after reflection after reflection. The queen looked at the blood and bone and muscles beneath her skin. She wondered how the princess could be prettier than _that._

xii.

Nobody brings Rachel Sarah’s heart. She has to go and get it herself. In her mind she remembers that slow imagined undressing, unmaking of Sarah at the DYAD (her skin, where Sarah bruised it, burns) and reverses that, builds Sarah on her skin like Jerusalem.

She feels a sheep in wolf’s clothing, here among the pack. In her pocket her needle-teeth wait. She pads to the room where Kira lies dreaming – wonders, idly, if Kira ever dreams of the smell of meat on a predator’s breath.

Raise a child in a wolf’s den, though, and the child learns to fear the hunter instead.

She sinks her teeth into Felix’s jugular when he tries to stop her. Or. Well. The needle. Rip out Felix’s throat and his blood would get in Sarah’s eye, Sarah’s hair, all over Sarah’s clothes. That wouldn’t do at all. It’s a pleasure best saved for another occasion, when her mouth is the right sort of red.

Instead she picks up Kira, gently, gently as she knows how, and presses the child against her heart. Beneath the layers of clothes she wears like a false armor she can feel Kira’s heart beating against her own. May as well be naked. May as well have nothing at all.

She walks into the night with the child, air as cold as teeth, and rolls the words _happily-ever-after_ around her mouth. Just to see how they taste.

xiii.

Ethan Duncan died two times.

That’s not a story at all, that’s not _fair._

Rachel hates him. She hates him. She hates him.

She hates what he’s done to her, the way he so _effortlessly_ stripped off all the years and years of _Rachel_ that Rachel has made and reduced her to a child again, screaming, afraid of the monster in the dark.

Afraid of the monster under her own skin.

She rips this hate off, discards it – no time, no time – and coaxes a new hate to life, the hate that he loved Sarah more than her. He loved Sarah enough to give her his heart, all pulsing circuitry and knots of numbers.

(Her father was a machine. Rachel learned from the best.)

She can’t put herself together again, though – bits of her crunch under her heel as she walks, like eggshells, and she goes to where Sarah is tied down and waiting for her.

Fur grows from her skin, as she goes.

xiv.

Seeing Sarah stripped of every sort of armor should make Rachel satisfied. It doesn’t. It _doesn’t_ , because Sarah is still able to beat her, still able to lie, all big eyes white teeth. It doesn’t, because Rachel is a wolf now, howling. Rachel wants to rip out Sarah’s throat with her teeth, she wants to suck the answers from Sarah’s mouth and gnaw at Sarah’s lips until they taste like blood, until they smell like meat, until she stops _lying_ about the fact that she is a predator.

They are both predators. That’s the point of the story. There is no wolf. There is no girl. Rachel threw out her book of fairy tales a long time ago, and there is no such thing as happily ever after.

They are both predators. They are wearing other skins, true, the clothing of other sheep, but they are both _predators_ underneath. Undress them and they are the same. She wishes Sarah would rise to the bait, snarl, show her teeth, stop pretending she does not _know_ about the sequences, of course she knows about the sequences, Ethan loved Sarah more, Paul loved Sarah more, Kira loves Sarah more, Kira will never love Rachel, she will always be waiting for the wolf at the door.

They are both predators. Rachel’s sure Sarah can smell the blood in the air just as well as she can, _three_ vials, three beneath her feet, happily

                                                                                                                                                                                                       ever

                                                                                                                                                                                                       after.

xv.

“ _Rachel._ ”

“I’ll tell you.”

There it is: there is Sarah, stripped bare, stripped of everything. Rachel closes her eyes for a second to breathe in the blood in the air, taste what victory tastes like on her tongue.

Then she turns around.

xvi.

Between Sarah Manning and Rachel Duncan there is one “i.”

Between Sarah Manning and Rachel Duncan there are two I’s.

Between Sarah Manning and Rachel Duncan there are three eyes.

It’s just like a story.

Isn’t it?


End file.
